Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative Launches Collection of Resources for Organizers, Advocates, and Community Members

May 29, 2025

Our Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative has been working over the past three years on resources to change narratives around punishment, safety, and healing. 

Our Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative (JBPC) has officially launched a collection of resources that the Collaborative members have been working on over the past three years. The resources are meant to support organizers, advocates, and community members in changing narratives around punishment, safety, and healing. They are founded in the core pillars of the Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative: 1.) Mass incarceration and other types of carceral punishment are forms of violence. They are often referred to as state violence.; 2.) Mass incarceration and carceral punishment don’t make us safer or prevent interpersonal violence. In fact, they promote interpersonal violence.; and 3.) To address interpersonal violence, we need to invest in community specific and community based approaches that prioritize safety, healing, and accountability

On May 21, JBPC convened local organizers, advocates, and community members at the People's Forum to discuss the purpose of the resources and break into groups to practice using the resources to address narratives around current issues including mass incarceration, reproductive justice, the criminalization of activism, and interpersonal and intimate partner violence. 

A group of people sitting in a circle

The Collaborative is a three-year initiative housed at the Center for Justice and dedicated to strengthening our movement efforts’ for narrative change around violence, punishment and incarceration. Together, the JBPC is  working to end the reliance on punishment, criminalization, and incarceration as the primary responses to violence, to build power and solidarity around shared messages, to develop shared tools and campaigns, and to amplify our individual and collective voices to press for lasting narrative change in New York.

In line with these objectives, the Collaborative has launched the following resources:

The Problem With Punishment Podcast

The problem with punishment is it doesn’t work. But the bigger problem is that we turn to punishment in every aspect of our lives. From our families to our neighborhoods, our boroughs, our city, we keep expecting punishment to make things better when for the most part, it makes whatever problem we’re addressing worse. Every time punishment fails, it hurts. Some people have taken the pain of that failure, and turned it into purpose.

In this podcast, we're talking to a range of New Yorkers who have experienced firsthand the failure of punishment and who have found or created something better to do instead. From gun violence to child abuse to drug addiction, New York can lead the way in actually solving some of our most pressing problems.

The Freedom for All Zine

This zine came out of a JBPC working group that focused on how advocacy often creates binaries or hierarchies of worthiness in terms of who is "deserving" of liberation, freedom, resources, healing, safety, justice, etc. This is done in messaging, policy demands, or concessions to get bills passed. We explored how this approach can be harmful to the overall movement to end punishment and violence and further “otherize” people who are already experiencing oppression and violence from the state. 

Justice Beyond Punishment Messaging Guide

This messaging guide was developed by the the Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative (JBPC) and Change Consulting to advance the work of safety, dignity and belonging through research-informed best practices of social change messaging that moves people to action.

You can think of these messages as building blocks to use when developing any kind of content — a social media post, web copy, newsletter, flier, op-ed, blog, talking points for funders or media interviews, presentations and speaking engagements, etc. Adapting the Values, Problem, Solution, Action messaging framework by the Opportunity Agenda, this set of core messages leads with shared values to activate emotions and open an audience’s minds and hearts. It then frames the problems we seek to solve as a threat to our values. This creates a sense of urgency and connects individual stories to broader systems and dynamics and primes our audience to learn about working towards justice beyond punishment. 

A photo of a read shirt that says "Justice Heals" and two resources, one that says "Freedom for All" and the other that says "Justice Beyond Punishment: Messages to Meet the Moment"